


Saturated

by shadesfalcon



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Rough Sex, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-18
Updated: 2015-05-18
Packaged: 2018-03-31 02:34:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3961162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadesfalcon/pseuds/shadesfalcon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>New to SHIELD and still trying to find her feet, Natalia Romanov is frustrated by her emotional attachment to the young archer who brought her in. In her line of work, this makes the safest course of action eliminating him immediately. She just can't find the motivation to finish the job.</p><p>Clint Barton knows he should find this disconcerting, but he can't help being flattered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saturated

**Author's Note:**

> For [pr4villains](http://pr4villains.tumblr.com/), who unintentionally prompted me.

Like so many things in their lives, it begins with violence.

Hell, forget _beginning_ in violence. No one is surprised that it begins with violence. It’s when it all continues in violence, that people start to worry. When it’s steeped with violence. Saturating and dripping onto anyone who comes close enough to get infected.

After Clint brings Natalia in to SHIELD, she’s more than a little pissy with him, and he understands why. He said a lot of things, and she probably doesn’t think they’re coming true. Not with the way she’s jumped when she steps foot into the outer reaches of the SHIELD perimeter. Not with the way she wakes up in a cell.

But Clint’s there, sitting on the concrete floor with a deck of cards and trying to figure out what kind of game you can play without the other person actually touching the cards. Because that glass is thick and he doesn’t have the clearance to open the door.

He settles on trying a magic trick, but he hasn’t practiced since the circus and hits himself in the face with the edge of a card. It leaves a red line that bleeds slowly, and Natalia just stares at him all the while.

“Tough crowd?” he mutters, smiling, and tries again. This time he pulls the trick off and shows Natalia exactly what her card was. He knows it’s her card. He’s 100% sure of it.

When he shows it, though, she shakes her head and says, “Not mine.”

They’re the first words in her new life, though she doesn’t know it yet, and there’s something _right_ about the fact that they’re a lie. Clint grins even wider.

Forty minutes later she’s broken out of the cell and attacked him fiercely. The cards are scattered and stepped on, and Clint has two separate bite marks that broke skin. Natalia has a dislocated shoulder. If she hadn’t been full of sedatives, he doubts the whole thing would have gone so well.

The entire ordeal takes about forty seconds – no one ever does figure out who she got the keycard off of – and the security is about a minute away from the cell. Astonishingly lax, but it does give Clint 20 seconds to shove Natalia back in her call and slam the door. He turns, restricting his panting, as the soldiers rush in with their guns.

“Problem?” Clint asks. He can’t do anything about the bleeding bite marks, standing out on his neck and forearm, but that doesn’t stop him from looking straight into the commander officer’s eye.

“You’re bleeding,” the man tells him. Monotone.

“I did it to myself,” Clint answers, regardless of the fact that one is right under his chin.

The small snort he gets from Natalia makes the whole thing worth it.

 *

When she’s finally released, and when people have stopped sending Fury strongly worded emails about his decision, Clint finds her lounging up in the window of the Citigroup Center Building. Not all that remarkable, except for the fact that it’s 2am and that particular window is exactly where Clint is going to be shooting his next target from.

“This mission was classified,” he informs her, but he’s grinning like he’s proud of her, and it makes her eye twitch. “How’d you even get out of D.C.? Thought they still had you on city-lockdown.”

“Guess I shouldn’t leave any witnesses then?” she purrs back, and Clint stands up from where he’s unpacking his rifle so quickly that he trips over the case and lands on his ass.

But Natalia is just sitting there, watching him, and she doesn’t even offer a snarky comment on his current struggle with gravity.

He gets to his feet and finishes setting up his rifle, watching her out of the corner of his eyes. And then –

“I need to shoot out that window. It’s the only one with the right angle.”

“This window?” she asks, innocently. “By all means.” She flattens her legs so she’s sitting extended across the entire window, but so there’s actually space for Clint to aim and fire. No space for him to set up a tripod though.

He shrugs and puts the tripod back in the case, smirking when Natalia raises an eyebrow in disbelief, and kneels beside her. He lays himself over her legs and braces himself on the inner part of the wide sill.

For a long time, no one breathes.

Then Clint reaches up and turns back up his mic.

“I’m in position.”

He’s not sure why he trusts her to be silent after that. If it’s discovered he hasn’t called in the disobedience of such a volatile asset, it’ll be his hide. But then again, it would probably put her thrown back in that glass cell. Lose-lose. And Natalia doesn’t seem the type to choose _any_ outcome that means she loses.

He’s right in guessing that she won’t say anything. He’s wrong in guessing that she won’t _do_ anything.

Less than a minute before he would have his shot, she twists over and hooks both legs around his chest. He makes a shocked noise, and then she throws herself off the ledge and down onto the floor, taking him with her.

They struggle for a few seconds, each trying to get fingers around each other’s throats. Yet the whole thing feels superficial. Clint has seen her file. She can be more vicious than this.

It doesn’t change the fact that she breaks his nose and now there’s blood in his mouth.

“Target in location,” the voice-in-his-ear informs him. “Fire when ready.”

_Shit._

He twists again, with renewed vivacity, and manages to dislodge her seat across his chest. It’s just enough that he can scramble back up to his hands and knees and crawl forward. His fingers brush the fallen rifle, and then he has to kick back harshly when he feels fingers at his ankle.

“Agent?” The voice is now both warning and concerned, but Clint doesn’t answer.

Another struggle forward, and he knows it’s now or never. Once she’s recovered, it’s unlikely he’ll get back up here.

He swings the weapon up over the sill, and aims. He doesn’t have time to set up and breathe, and has to play the whole thing by instinct. The moment he fires, her hands are on his ankles again, dragging him back down.

There’s a moment of panic in his chest – he never missed, he can’t now – but it’s pushed down to a manageable level when the Voice says, “Nice shot, Agent,” and he’s suddenly able to focus all of his attention on this violent mess of a girl.

She’s got him on his back, with one of her legs between his and she’s pushing down and crushing his balls, and he’s trying to gasp around it until she tops it off with several well-timed punches on either side of body, and he’s going to be pissing blood for _days_ if he can piss at all.

This is much closer to the vicious woman he’d been trailing via the corpses she left behind.

But then she pauses. Maybe because he’s not fighting back or because she’s impressed he made the shot or because she’s just too exhausted to do fuck all else. He takes the frozen moment to gently shove her off him, and then just both breathe.

“Get what you came for?” he asks.

She makes a noise low in her throat and stands fluidly. She stalks toward him, and he worries they’re going to do another round, but she just climbs out the window that has shattered under the impact of his erratic bullet, and swings out into the night.

“Agent?” the voice returns. “Are you on your way to the pickup point?”

“Yeah,” Clint groans, getting to his feet. “Totally on my way.”

 *

The next time he sees her on one of his assignments, she’s there because she’s part of the team. He hopes it means that whatever she’s battling in her own mind can wait until they get back to base, but he isn’t really surprised that he’s wrong.

At least she waits until the mission is finished and they’re heading back to their extraction location. The only warning he gets is a flash of red against the flat white snow and then she’s on him. They roll over a couple of times, but he doesn’t complain out loud until slush slides down his shirt.

“Natalia!” he spits in frustration, and it’s the first time he’s said anything about her attack, so it makes her pause.

“You got snow down my shirt, and it’s fucking cold. Ug!” He shifts around a bit, trying to find a position where the water doesn’t touch his skin, but it’s hopeless. “Why aren’t the insides of these waterproof? It’s seeping!”

She just stares down at him, emotionless, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He sighs and stops thrashing around, staring up at her. “What are we doing?” he asks softly.

Which must have been the other shoe, because that’s when she punches him in the face. He does see the motion coming, and manages to get one leg hooked up and around her. One twist later, and at least he’s dislodged her stance.

It’s give-and-take all the way through, but she doesn’t stop until Clint is face-first on the ground in the snow, arm twisted behind his back, and he knows his knee is dislocated. He goes limp, then, letting the snow seep into his collar because they’re both soaked at this point anyway.

Eventually she releases her grip on his wrist and backs off, letting him get to his feet.

“We’ve missed our extraction,” he tells her, but she’s impassive. Doesn’t even shrug.

Clint pops his knee back into joint – at least that one’s easy to do on your own – and tests it out with a few steps.

“You must be fast,” he tells her. “Freaky fast. I know where your position was for this op, and I can’t figure out how you got over here that quickly. It must be a pleasure to watch you work.”

When she doesn’t say anything back, he just grins.

*

They have to make their way back on their own, since there’s a mandatory 48 hour wait on this mission. Too risky to get another extraction in place so quickly. He wonders briefly if the rest of his team is worried, but he shrugs it off. Agents’ lives are made of worry. It’s just the way it goes.

They manage to jump a couple trains, and then talk their way into Latvia. That one is a pretty close call, and he expects Natalia to break out into violence, but she smiles and purrs and bribes and lies and pickpockets and everything except attacks.

It’s an un-subtle jab. _Just for you_ , she’s saying.

It’s flattering.

The next attack comes when they reach Germany and feel it’s finally safe to sleep. They crash in a motel, an explosive rigged to a pressure plate in front of the door, and Clint’s asleep before he’s fully horizontal.

It’s a short lived sleep. Maybe twenty seconds, before he wakes to hands around his throat. He comes to with an alarming disassociation from reality, and really fights back for the first time. She’s not the only one who knows how to be vicious.

He gets dangerously close to digging a thumb into one of her eyes before she bites his hand hard enough to wake him up to the situation. He switches his fighting style back to cautiously defensive, and her mouth turns down. She catches a hold of both his wrists and shoves them away from her.

“You’re going easy?” she hisses, as though it were the highest insult.

“Aren’t you?” he counters.

“ _I_ don’t need to fight at full strength in order to kill you.”

“I don’t need to fight at full strength to get you to not.”

She gets up, then, and paces around the room. Back and forth until Clint is lulled into lying back on the bed again, watching her walk.

“What are we doing?” he asks her again.

“Fuck you!” she spits, and storms into the bathroom where she slams the door.

Clint falls asleep before she decides to come back out.

 *

 When they do get back to base, Natalia lets him explain their situation, and he lies through his teeth. She supports him on the fly, anticipating where the story is going and offering matching details with “genuine” emotional facial expressions.

“We’re a pretty good team,” he smirks at her, on the way out. “I think I’ll request you again.”

He thinks she might be about to attack him again, but the cameras in the hall would be a pain to swipe the tapes from, and she decides against it.

Clint isn’t bluffing, and puts her name in as a requested teammate. And when they come up together on a mission roster, she shows up in his apartment.

“Should I ask how you found this address?” he sighs, but that’s all he has time for before she sweeps his legs out from under him. He hits the ground on his back, and gets most of the air knocked out of him, but he finds the energy to wheeze out, “At least shut the damn door. I have neighbors.”

She rolls her eyes, but reaches out and pulls the door shut.

It breaks the tension, however, and they stare at each other.

“Why did you request me on your team?” She gestures between them. “This is a liability. This is a weakness.”

It clicks in his head.

“You think emotion is a weakness,” he says. “You think the fact that you can’t kill me makes you weak.”

“I already would have been made to kill you. Before.”

He struggles into sitting position and rested his arms on his knees. “The KGB would have made you kill a teammate?”

“No. Before that.”

Clint knows her files are painfully empty in regards to her former life. The Red Room. Her remaking. Clint holds his silence, knowing that they’ve somehow crossed back into dangerous territory.

“It’s a _weakness_!” she screams suddenly, taking a half-step forward.

“Why?” he challenges. “Because you can’t control it?”

“Yes!” She’s desperate for him to understand. To disappear from her life.

“That’s not a weakness. That’s a reflex. It’s the same when someone brushes the back of your neck when you didn’t expect it. You swing around and rip their throat out. You see a movement in the corner of your eye, and you put a bullet through its head. It’s the same. You see your teammate in danger and you protect them. It’s just the way it goes.”

“Reflexes are supposed to protect your own self.”

“And? You think this doesn’t?” He’s leaning forward in his eagerness to get his point across. He can tell they’re on the edge of something, and he knows he can’t push her over into the conclusion, but he’s desperate for her to get there.

“And what?” he asks. “And personal attachments don’t protect you?”

“Exactly!”

“Yes, they do! They protect a different part of you.”

She’s gone, out the door, before he can say anything else, and the door swings out so hard that it bangs against the wall. Clint watches it slowly swing back toward shut, and bites the inside of his cheek.

 *

 When he sees her the next day at headquarters, she doesn’t even look at him.

 *

 When they both get put on an overseas mission – it’s a big team, over fifteen agents – he doesn’t see her until the debriefing.

 *

 He’s relieved when she shows up in the showers. It’s disconcerting, but he’s still relieved.

He’s just finishing a particularly intense work out in one of the lesser used gyms in the building, and he’s leaning against the cold shower wall, watching the steam, when she jerks the shower curtain open.

He gasps and rushes to cover himself with one hand, shooing at her with the other.

“What the hell, Natalia?”

“You,” she sputters, pointing at him, but that seems to be all she can manage in English. The next string of words are an obscure Eastern European dialect, and Clint can’t follow. She does take a threatening step forward, and the water is falling on her pants. It seeps up her leg, and suddenly that’s all Clint can look at.

She huffs when she realizes how distracted he’s become, and takes another step to grasp his chin in her hand. The water’s pouring over her shoulders now, and he can’t make himself feel the fear he probably should.

“Why?” she asks, and he doesn’t know how to respond.

He thinks the answer might be somewhere in the echo of the water against the tile. In the brush of her fingers against his cheek. In the cold draft that seeps in behind the open curtain.

The moment is broken when the door to the showers squeaks, and they suddenly become aware that they’re not alone. Clint’s eyes widened, but Natalia’s narrow. With one hand, she reaches behind and closes the curtain, and with the other, she pushed a finger against Clint’s lips.

_Shhhh._

Her eyes are dilated, and Clint is very aware of how naked he is, and there are only a handful of ways this situation can play out. He hopes it doesn’t play out with him on the floor with a bleeding head.

_Here lies a SHIELD Agent, best sniper of all time. Drowned in an inch of water like a fucking idiot._

When she wraps her fingers around the edge of her shirt hem, he sucks in a quick breath. Its pull off is slow as she’s markedly patient. She doesn’t want the sound of the shirt to give away their presence.

Clint hears a shower a few down from them turn on, and he can’t help but reach out to take her waist in his hands.

She keeps pulling her shirt off with one hand, but she uses the other to grip his throat. He chokes, silently, but doesn’t release his hold. She doesn’t stop undressing.

She uses her foot to lower the shirt to the ground without letting it squish loudly against gravity. And then they’re kissing, breathy and loud, and Clint gets the distinct impression that whoever else is in this gym bathroom probably thinks Clint had his hands all over himself.

And then she’s gone, soaking wet and pulled away. She picks her shirt up with her fingers and slips out. Clint waits a few seconds, and then breathes out in a rush. He still half expects something to happen, but the stillness stretches on until the man down the row turns his own shower off.

Clint reaches out and twists the shower over the cold water, and waits to calm down.

 *

Three days later, he’s awoken from a deep sleep when he’s yanked out of bed by one arm. He hits the cold floor hard and grunts, reaching with one hand to try and grab the ankle of whoever had danced close enough to get within his reach.

Not “whoever.”

And she’s no longer within his reach.

“Don’t you know any other way to do this?” he asks. He’s still breathing hard and the edges of his dream are hanging in his mind. He manages to get to his knees before she comes at him again. She gets her fingers twisted in his hair and wrenches his head back, throwing him so he leans back against the bed.

“No,” she whispers as she settles to straddle his lap.

It takes Clint to realize that she’s answering his question. That this is the only way she knows how to do this. That she can only let go when she can argue she was forced.

It’s probably fucked up. It’s probably unhealthy. It’s probably unlikely that this can lead to anything good, but he can’t help it.

Their lives are fucked up. Their lives are unhealthy. Their lives will never lead to anything good.

She’s wants it to be violent; she can have it.

He stops holding back, and uses the split second of startle confusion to shove her down onto the floor. _He_ straddles _her_ and pins _her_ hands above her head. There’s a moment that he thinks he guessed wrong – when she manages to break one of her hands free. Maybe he didn’t understand what she was saying, and he thinks maybe she’ll break his neck.

But then she stills underneath him, and her eyes are dilated more than he’s ever seen them, and her fingers are scrabbling at her waistband.

*

Like their lives, their love begins in violence. Like their lives, it’s steeped in violence. Like their lives, it will probably end in violence.

And none of those facts make the taste of each other any less sweet.


End file.
